The plaintiff team has dropped a lawsuit against actor and accused sexual abuser Kevin Spacey. The man behind the complaint, a massage therapist identified by the pseudonym John Doe, had passed away.
“Mr. Spacey paid no money to the plaintiff,” Spacey attorney Jennifer L. Keller told The New York Times in an email Tuesday. “The plaintiff wished to dismiss the case and we stipulated to the dismissal to speed things up. What you see in the stipulation is all there is to see. Any reports to the contrary are false.”
According to the lawsuit, Spacey forced the massage therapist to grab his genitals during a session. The alleged victim passed away in September 2018 causing complications in the legal action. Indeed, the plaintiff’s estate did have the option to move forward, but their options were few and unlikely to succeed now that the man was gone.
Law&Crime columnist Elura Nanos wrote in September that it was going to be hard for the plaintiff team to win because evidence would be a big challenge with the actual plaintiff gone.
Beneficiaries of John Doe’s estate may realize that their chances of walking away with big money damages aren’t great, and just choose to preserve as much of the estate funds as possible. If they determine that the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze (or, if they value Doe’s anonymity above all else), they’ll move to dismiss the case voluntarily.
In another case, Spacey was being charged in Massachusetts with sexually assaulting an 18-year-old restaurant bus boy in 2016. Snapchat footage allegedly proved the claim. The case was dropped when the alleged victim in that case pleaded the Fifth in a preliminary hearing. His mother testified that she deleted data from his cell phone, but she asserted this was unrelated to the case. The defense had claimed the incident in question was consensual.
John Doe wasn’t even the last alleged Spacey victim to pass away in 2019. Author Ari Behn, who said that Spacey once groped him at a Nobel Peace Prize concert, died by suicide in December.
Actor Anthony Rapp also said that was 14 when Spacey, then 26, made a sexual advance on him. Others have stepped forward with their own claims.
[Image via Nicole Harnishfeger-Pool/Getty Images]
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